My mother is against Disney (meaning everything having to do with Disney, the man, the movies, EVERYTHING), so when I was little, the first cartoons I watched were Miyazaki films, like Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. Also, when I was two a Japanese college student came to live with us for a year, followed the next year by another Japanese college student (and so on until I was 16).
So I have always been exposed to anime and j-pop. I watched Sailor Moon growing up had Sailor Pluto and Sailor Venus barbie dolls, numerous Ghibli stuffed animals, and even a Sailor Moon wand and a Cardcaptors book of cards.
However, my mother was never very into anime herself and now whenever I try discussing a show with her, specifically when I get into the convoluted plot synopsis, she tunes out and doesn’t really care. I think she worries that I spend too much time watching episode after episode instead of noticing time passing and taking advantage of being young (those are almost her words, actually). But I also think her pointed disinterest stems in part from the vast amount of people who are only exposed to Japanese culture through anime and so have this slightly glorified/romanticized idea of what Japanese culture is in their head. She’s really disgusted by the people get so obsessed with anime and what they understand to be Japanese culture and the whole fangirl-type admiration. Her mixed feelings about anime, I think, are in a large part due to the way anime is consumed by western, European-based societies. But I also think that my family, being an immigrant family themselves from the Middle East, can easily pick out how you are supposed to conduct yourself in a different culture, which I don’t think many Americans are versed in or ever have to practice. So the danger of being exposed to one type of media from a different culture but never actually interacting with the people of that culture is this subtle thing that lulls people into a certain way of thinking that is then taken for granted. I think my parents could see that anime is from this little group of people who actually don’t really fit in with the whole traditional ideas of the culture and so what is emphasized in anime is the break from tradition and an embrace of individualism. I grew up in a culture where if someone older than you entered the room you have to stand up and bow a little bit and then wait for them to be seated before you sit down again, and you never disagree with an opinion of someone older than you. I grew up with parents from a culture that has a few similarities to Japanese culture, so I think the way my parents view anime is with this awareness of cultural nuances.
If you’ve ever seen the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, my father is the father in that story who claims that everything in modern society originally came from the Ancient Greeks. Only for us it’s Persia. Once I showed my dad a little clip of anime and he immediately claimed that Persians did it first – his proof being thousands-of-years-old picture books that tell the epic tale of the Persian kings in rhyming verse, painstaking painted with paintbrushes made of a single hair. If I try and talk about the plot points of a certain anime, my dad immediately claims that the creators obviously took inspiration from Persian myths. The mecha stuff stumped him at first but he quickly recovered and alluded to the constant wars of the Middle East.
But on a serious note, I think my dad is sad that his culture is so ignored by the world and feels like it’s fading because I am not experiencing what he experienced growing up and instead am watching all this Japanese stuff in Japanese and my Farsi isn’t as good as it should be, and I’m not interested in the Iranian soap operas. I think he just doesn’t want me to forget what I come from. I think my mom feels the same way. |